About

Gary Donnelly is a crime and thriller writer from Belfast who lives and works in London. BLOOD WILL BE BORN is his debut novel published by Endeavour Media, voted an Endeavour Press Book of the Year 2017. Watch Gary speak about his book in this 30 minute televised interview on Novel Ideas for NVTV. The audio book, published by Isis Publishing Ltd, is spoken by Irish actor Stephen Armstrong. Blood Will Be Born is the first book in the DI Owen Sheen series. Adrian McKinty, the 2017 Ned Kelly and Edgar Award winning Irish crime novelist had this to say about the book: “A twisty, violent, cop thriller set in post conflict Belfast where hard men lurk in pubs and back alleys awaiting their chance to mete out the old kind of justice from the dark days of the Troubles. Brilliant. Gary Donnelly is an exciting new voice in Northern Irish noir.”

Gary attended a state comprehensive school in west Belfast, read History at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and has lived and worked in London since the late 1990s. In his time he has been a Belfast cemetery manager, a business conference organiser in the City, a council gardener in Neasdon, and gained a further degree in Psychology, which he teaches in north London. Gary is married to the lovely Sacha and has two non-returnable children. He can cook up a storm and play a mean guitar (after a few drinks).

Gary has this to say about his writing: “I have always wanted to write a novel and after I enrolled on a course at the City Lit two years ago, the initial outline of BLOOD WILL BE BORN emerged from one of the homework exercises. But the story has been incubating for much longer. I left Belfast 20 years ago but you see it never really left me. The course finished, and I kept writing; on my day off, weekends and while travelling into work. I took the first 3000 words to Crimefest 2016’s Pitch an Agent slot and Camilla Wray, Laetitia Rutherford, and Broo Doherty gave the sample and the synopsis and big thumbs up, and gave me incredibly positive feedback about my writing and the market potential of the book. In fact, they originally assumed I was being tutored by a published writer or part of a publishing house postgraduate programme, which was very encouraging. Enough, in fact, to get up at 5am to write before work, and finish the first draft.”